It's All Trump's Fault-- Really
Republicans keep looking for a Democrat who has lied on the same scale as George Santos. There is no one— other than Trump— who has existed in such a fabricated bubble as Santos has. And the entertainment value is likely to go on for months. Someone did point out a state legislative race in Washington where there was a case of misrepresentation, albeit nothing like Santos’. Still interesting though.
First the basics. Washington’s 10th legislative district— Whidbey and Camano islands and parts of Skagit and Snohomish counties— is a swing district. One of their Reps, Dave Paul, is a Democrat and one, Greg Gilday is— or was— a Republican. No, Gilday is still a Republican. He just isn’t a Representative any longer. Democratic challenger Clyde Shavers beat him last month. It was close and their was a recount, but after the recount, Shavers beat him by a little more— 37,375 votes (50.07%) to Gilday’s 37,164 (49.79%), a difference of 211 votes. The Republicans, badly outnumbered in the state legislature, were confident they would pick up a handful of Democratic seats. They didn’t. Instead they lost two of them own, including Gilday’s.
Gilday’s loss is especially noteworthy because of Brett Shavers, Clyde’s estranged MAGA father. How MAGA? He was part of the J-6 insurrection in DC and he wrote a 3-page letter to Gilday and to a local newspaper, the Everett Herald, denouncing his son for embellishing his campaign bio. But not quite the way George Santos did.
Clyde graduated from Yale Law School and is a lawyer but, not having passed the Washington bar exam yet, not an attorney. There was also a question about what he was doing in the Navy after he graduated from Annapolis and then the Nuclear Power School. He served 6 years in the Navy as a public affairs officer, not as a nuclear submarine officer and there was an argument over wording in how that was explained— and the crackpot MAGA father, an extremist gun nut, said Clyde hates the military.
In campaign mailers and on his website, Clyde Shavers initially described himself as having “served as a nuclear submarine officer and public affairs officer with tours in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.”
Those references have been changed to say Shavers graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and then “commissioned into the nuclear submarine community and later transitioned as a public affairs officer in 2015.”
The discrepancies led the editorial board of the Daily Herald of Everett, which first reported on the allegations, to pull its endorsement of Shavers this week.
“Candidates for public office, because of the trust that is required to represent the interests of the residents of one’s district and the state, must be held to a high standard regarding the veracity of their record and their positions. Shavers has violated that trust,” the board wrote.
Shavers did engage in submarine officer training and served more than six years in the Navy as a public affairs officer. His campaign website now features a statement about the controversy that concludes by saying: “I would like to apologize to any supporter who felt misled by any statement I have made regarding my service record— this was never my intention.”
Shavers has declined interview requests since the story emerged. He issued a statement saying he was estranged from his father and describing his father’s letter as “all about politics.”
He released screenshots of text messages that appear to show his father was in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of Donald Trump supporters trying to block certification of Joe Biden’s presidential win attacked the U.S. Capitol.
“While I haven’t spoken to my father for some time, I know that he was at the Capitol on January 6th. This is the kind of politics that’s tearing apart families and communities, and my campaign is about healing and moving forward,” he said in the statement.
Brett Shavers did not respond to a phone message this week. In his letter, he said he had stressed to his son “that he must be truthful” and simply say he’d gone through some submarine training.
…In the current race, an independent-spending PAC aligned with Democrats has doubled down, seeking to turn the tables against Gilday by accusing the Republican and his backers of unfairly attacking Shavers.
A mailer this week sponsored by New Direction PAC asks, “What kind of people would lie about a veteran’s service?” and says Gilday voted against lowering health care costs for disabled veterans and their families. The PAC also has launched a website dedicated to the issue, ShaversServed.com, which says Republicans “are smearing the record of a man who has served our country.”
Jared Leopold, a Democratic political consultant for the PAC, said the mailer was sent out earlier this week, “before this story broke.” Still, he defended the PAC’s ongoing support for Shavers.
“New Direction PAC will continue to highlight the choice for voters between Clyde Shavers’ plans to stand up for the people of the 10th District and Greg Gilday’s record of standing with anti-abortion and gun lobby special interests,” Leopold said in a statement.
Shavers’ campaign has reported about $473,000 in expenditures and Gilday’s campaign has reported about $334,000, putting both among the Top 10 best-bankrolled candidates this year.
Their race has also drawn more than $590,000 in independent spending by PACs, ranking No. 5 among legislative contests in that regard. New Direction PAC has spent the most, though a Republican Party PAC called Evergreen Progress has also invested a substantial amount.
An OpEd by conservative David Brooks in the New York Times on Wednesday, explains the difference between embellishing and lying-- the difference, in effect, between Shavers and Santos. "What," asked Brooks, "would it be like to be so ashamed of your life that you felt compelled to invent a new one? Most of us don’t feel compelled to do that. Most of us take the actual events of our lives, including the failures and frailties, and we gradually construct coherent narratives about who we are. Those autobiographical narratives are always being updated as time passes— and, of course, tend to be at least modestly self-flattering. But for most of us, the life narrative we tell both the world and ourselves gives us a stable sense of identity. It helps us name what we’ve learned from experience and what meaning our life holds. It helps us make our biggest decisions. As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre once observed, you can’t know what to do unless you know what story you are a part of... All politicians— perhaps all human beings— embellish. But what Santos did goes beyond that. He fabricated a new persona, that of a meritocratic superman. He claims to be a populist who hates the elites, but he wanted you to think he once worked at Goldman Sachs. Imagine how much inadequacy you’d have to feel to go to all that trouble."
Brooks got to the real heart of the matter as well: "In a sense Santos is a sad, farcical version of where Donald Trump has taken the Republican Party— into the land of unreality, the continent of lies. Trump’s takeover of the GOP was not primarily an ideological takeover, it was a psychological and moral one. I don’t feel sorry for Trump the way I do for Santos, because Trump is so cruel. But he did introduce, on a much larger scale, the same pathetic note into our national psychology. In his book, The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump, the eminent personality psychologist Dan McAdams argues that Trump could continually lie to himself because he had no actual sense of himself. There was no real person, inner life or autobiographical narrative to betray. McAdams quotes people who had been close to Trump who reported that being with him wasn’t like being with a conventional person; it was like being with an entity who was playing the role of Donald Trump. And that role had no sense of continuity. He was fully immersed in whatever dominance battle he was fighting at that moment."
McAdams calls Trump an “episodic man,” who experiences life as a series of disjointed moments, not as a coherent narrative flow of consciousness. “He does not look to what may lie ahead, at least not very far ahead,” McAdams writes. “Trump is not introspective, retrospective or prospective. There is no depth; there is no past; there is no future.”
America has always had impostors and people who reinvented their pasts. (If he were real, Jay Gatsby might have lived— estimations of the precise locations of the fictional East and West Egg vary— in what is now Santos’s district.) This feels different. I wonder if the era of the short-attention spans and the online avatars is creating a new character type: the person who doesn’t experience life as an accumulation over decades, but just as a series of disjointed performances in the here and now, with an echo of hollowness inside.